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The Programming Talent Myth
HughPickens.com writes: Jake Edge writes at LWN.net that there is a myth that programming skill is somehow distributed on a U-shaped curve and that people either "suck at programming" or that they "rock at programming", without leaving any room for those in between. Everyone is either an amazing programmer or "a worthless use of a seat" which doesn't make much sense. If you could measure programming ability somehow, its curve would look like the normal distribution. According to Edge this belief that programming ability fits into a bi-modal distribution is both "dangerous and a myth". "This myth sets up a world where you can only program if you are a rock star or a ninja. It is actively harmful in that is keeping people from learning programming, driving people out of programming, and it is preventing most of the growth and the improvement we'd like to see." If the only options are to be amazing or terrible, it leads people to believe they must be passionate about their career, that they must think about programming every waking moment of their life. If they take their eye off the ball even for a minute, they will slide right from amazing to terrible again leading people to be working crazy hours at work, to be constantly studying programming topics on their own time, and so on.
The truth is that programming isn't a passion or a talent, says Edge, it is just a bunch of skills that can be learned. Programming isn't even one thing, though people talk about it as if it were; it requires all sorts of skills and coding is just a small part of that. Things like design, communication, writing, and debugging are needed. If we embrace this idea that "it's cool to be okay at these skills"—that being average is fine—it will make programming less intimidating for newcomers. If the bar for success is set "at okay, rather than exceptional", the bar seems a lot easier to clear for those new to the community. According to Edge the tech industry is rife with sexism, racism, homophobia, and discrimination and although it is a multi-faceted problem, the talent myth is part of the problem. "In our industry, we recast the talent myth as "the myth of the brilliant asshole", says Jacob Kaplan-Moss. "This is the "10x programmer" who is so good at his job that people have to work with him even though his behavior is toxic. In reality, given the normal distribution, it's likely that these people aren't actually exceptional, but even if you grant that they are, how many developers does a 10x programmer have to drive away before it is a wash?"
The truth is that programming isn't a passion or a talent, says Edge, it is just a bunch of skills that can be learned. Programming isn't even one thing, though people talk about it as if it were; it requires all sorts of skills and coding is just a small part of that. Things like design, communication, writing, and debugging are needed. If we embrace this idea that "it's cool to be okay at these skills"—that being average is fine—it will make programming less intimidating for newcomers. If the bar for success is set "at okay, rather than exceptional", the bar seems a lot easier to clear for those new to the community. According to Edge the tech industry is rife with sexism, racism, homophobia, and discrimination and although it is a multi-faceted problem, the talent myth is part of the problem. "In our industry, we recast the talent myth as "the myth of the brilliant asshole", says Jacob Kaplan-Moss. "This is the "10x programmer" who is so good at his job that people have to work with him even though his behavior is toxic. In reality, given the normal distribution, it's likely that these people aren't actually exceptional, but even if you grant that they are, how many developers does a 10x programmer have to drive away before it is a wash?"
What annoys me is that despite the Mythical Man Month still being the only vaguely scientific analysis, and despite the fact that it demolished a bunch of received wisdom and only created ONE fact of its own - the existence of the 10x programmer - somehow because it was written a long time ago that means it "no longer applies".
Of course your misrepresentation of the 10x rule isn't helping. The 10x rule is that the best developers are 10x as productive as the worst 10 developers. That's all it says. So you can replace them with 10 worse developers, that's the whole frickin' point of the 10x rule.
If you wish to invent another rule, that some tasks are so hard that only some programmers can succeed at them, you can go gather your own evidence, but don't pretend it's "the 10x rule" because it isn't, and your rule did not come out of the only vaguely scientific analysis that's been done, and you shouldn't pretend that it did.
A downward slope would just be non-normalized data. If there are a lot of bad ones, bad just becomes the mean. Programming talent, like most things, probably falls neatly into a bell curve.
The U curve the article is referring to is a bimodel distribution, which is rare even in nature. It occurs for something like a disease that effects immune compromised people. Thus the age distribution of infected would be the very old and very young.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
many users inexplicably believing that programming requires a "special mind", dividing people in to two groups: "can program" and "can never program".
This is not "inexplicable". It is obvious to anyone who has taught programming to beginners, or any type of introductory abstract math. About a third of the population is simply incapable of abstract reasoning. If you think otherwise, I invite you to come to my house, and I will give you a free dinner while you explain "vectors" to my 15 year old daughter. Good luck with that.